In the depths of loneliness, however, internet dating provided me with a lot of opportunities to go to a bar and have a drink with a stranger on nights that would otherwise have been spent unhappy and alone. I met all kinds of people: an X-ray technician, a green tech entrepreneur, a Polish computer programmer with whom I enjoyed a sort of chaste fondness over the course of several weeks. We were both shy and my feelings were tepid as, I gathered, were his , but we went to the beach, he told me all about mushroom foraging in Poland, he ordered his vegetarian burritos in Spanish, and we shared many mutual dislikes.

It is interesting how we tend to characterize the online vs. Great and interesting article. I think online dating is interesting, in that we never have to be alone on a Friday or Saturday night, which is truly amazing. On the other end of the spectrum, we reach a point of information overload. I often wonder if everyone will grow more shallow and superficial as time passes and online dating continues to grow….

You are commenting using your WordPress. com account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. When I moved in, the receipt for the blanket was on the mantelpiece. There was a cast-iron gas stove in the fireplace.

At night the room had the temperature and pallor of a corpse. There was no television. I returned to my mobile and opened OK Cupid, the free internet dating service. I refreshed the feed that indicated whether other people in the neighbourhood were sitting alone in bars. This service is called OK Cupid Locals. He was Brazilian. I speak Portuguese. He played the drums. Every era has its own utopian possibilities: ours is the chance to make our lives more bearable through technology.

The man generally held responsible for internet dating as we know it today is a native of Illinois called Gary Kremen, but Kremen was out of the internet dating business altogether by , just around the time people were signing up for the internet en masse.

Today he runs a solar energy financing company, is an elected official in Los Altos Hills, California and is better known for his protracted legal battle over the ownership of the pornography website sex. com than he is for inventing internet dating. His life has passed through periods of grave disarray. When I met him, at a conference on the internet dating industry in Miami last January, he asked where I was from.

It turned out that Kremen had once driven, or been driven, into the river. He used to be addicted to speed. In Miami Kremen recounted the genesis of his ideas about internet dating to a room full of matchmakers. In , he was a year-old computer scientist and one of the many graduates of Stanford Business School running software companies in the Bay Area. One afternoon a routine email with a purchase order attached to it arrived in his inbox.

At the time, emails from women in his line of work were exceedingly rare. He stared at it. He showed the email to his colleagues. He tried to imagine the woman behind it. If he could create such a database and charge a fee to access it, he would most probably turn a profit. Then there was the scarcity of women with online access. Because in its early days the internet was prevalent in worlds that had historically excluded women — the military, finance, mathematics and engineering — women were not online in big numbers.

As late as America Online estimated that of its five million users, 79 per cent were men. In more administrative fields, however, a growing number of women had email.

So Kremen started with email. He left his job, hired some programmers with his credit card, and created an email-based dating service. Subscribers were given anonymous addresses from which to send out their profiles with a photo attached.

The photos arrived as hard copy, and Kremen and his employees scanned them in by hand. Interested single people who did not yet have email could participate by fax.

By modems had got faster, so Kremen moved to take his company online. He and four male partners formed Electric Classifieds Inc, a business premised on the idea of re-creating online the classifieds section of newspapers, beginning with the personals. They rented an office in a basement in San Francisco and registered the domain match. The business plan cited a market forecast that suggested 50 per cent of the adult population would be single by a poll found 48 per cent of American adults were single, compared to 28 per cent in At the time, single people, particularly those over the age of 30, were still seen as a stigmatised group with which few wanted to associate.

But the age at which Americans marry was rising steadily and the divorce rate was high. Since Kremen started his company little has changed in the industry. Niche dating sites have proliferated, new technology has made new ways of meeting people possible and new gimmicks hit the market every day, but as I knew from my own experience, the fundamental characteristics of the online dating profile have remained static. At the same time big cities have a way of shrinking. New faces!

OK Cupid was founded in by four maths majors from Harvard who were good at giving away things people were used to paying for study guides, music. Like Match, OK Cupid has its users fill out a questionnaire.

One occurrence in both online and real-life dating was an inexplicable talent on my part for attracting vegetarians. I am not a vegetarian. The more an internet-dating site leads with the traditional signifiers of male sexual desire — pictures of women in their knickers, open hints about casual sex — the less likely women are to sign up for it.

Kremen had also noticed this, and set up Match to look neutral and bland, with a heart-shaped logo. I wanted a boyfriend. I was also badly hung up on someone and wanted to stop thinking about him. People cheerily list their favourite movies and hope for the best, but darkness simmers beneath the chirpy surface. An extensive accrual of regrets lurks behind even the most well-adjusted profile.

I read 19th-century novels to remind myself that sunny equanimity in the aftermath of heartbreak was not always the order of the day. I also signed up to Match, but OK Cupid was the one I favoured, mostly because I got such constant and overwhelming attention from men there. The square-jawed bankers who reigned over Match, with their pictures of scuba diving in Bali and skiing in Aspen, paid me so little attention it made me feel sorry for myself.

I went to a lecture by the novelist Ned Beauman who compared the OK Cupid experience to Carl Sagan pondering the limits of our ability even to imagine non-carbon-based extraterrestrial life, let alone perceive when it was beaming signals to us. We troll on OK Cupid for what we think we want, but what if we are incapable of seeing the signals being sent to us, let alone interpreting them?

There are drawbacks to this. What Beauman says about our inability to gauge what might be attractive turned out to be true. Consider the following. I went on a date with a classical composer who invited me to a John Cage concert at Juilliard. After the concert we looked for the bust of Béla Bartók on 57th Street. I gave it another go. We went out for a second time to eat ramen in the East Village.

I ended the night early. He next invited me to a concert at Columbia and then to dinner at his house. I said yes but I cancelled at the last minute, claiming illness and adding that I thought our dating had run its course. I was in fact sick, but he was angry with me. I apologised, then stopped responding.

In the months that followed he continued to write, long emails with updates of his life, and I continued not responding until it came to seem as if he was lobbing his sadness into a black hole, where I absorbed it into my own sadness. I went on a date with a furniture craftsman. We met at a coffee shop. It was a sunny afternoon in late February, but a strange snowfall began after we arrived, the flakes sparkling in the sun.

The coffee shop was below ground, and we sat at a table by a window that put us just below two chihuahuas tied to a bench on the sidewalk outside. They shivered uncontrollably despite their fitted jackets. They looked down at us through the window, chewing on their leashes. The woodworker bought me a coffee and drank tea in a pint glass. Our conversation was strained. He seemed bored. His blue eyes shifted restlessly and he had a moustache. He had gone to a school for graphic design in Arizona.

He showed me photos of furniture he made. He had calloused hands and was tall. He was attractive but dour and I wondered why: was it me, or a generalised posture against the world?

We discovered we had been born in the same hospital, Allentown Hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania, except that I was seven months older. In another era, the era when marriage was dictated by religion, family and the village, we might have had several children by now.

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After drinking his tea, he went to the bathroom, came back and wordlessly put on his coat. Times Literary Supplement. GOP String Divas. I returned to my mobile and opened OK Cupid, the free internet dating service. We walked from Cafecito Bogotá back to his impeccable apartment, where he played ambient records and I petted his two cats.

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